I had a strange problem a couple of days ago; and it had hit me right at the time when I would have least wanted it to!!! Just till 20 minutes before the problem, I had prepared for a corporate presentation over the internet (through webex); Had installed the required component in Firefox, had a colleague walk me through how to host a presentation, etc.

But when the time came to actually log in and start the presentation, I could not connect to the site!!! I could have understood it if it had been my network failing me... but it was working fine!! I was able to browse a few sites, Google, GMail, Google docs, licofindia.com, and a few others that I cared to check.

And the strange thing was that there were a few sites I wasn't able to browse: webex.com, snapfish.com, kotaksecurities.com, and the list grew in the next 24 hours that I waited for the problem to solve itself.

The worst part was that I was totally cut-off from my corporate network!!! no mails.. even the web-interface of our mailing system vanished from the face of internet-earth! enterprisedb.com, mail01.enterprisedb.com .. everything failed!!

My colleague devised a workaround and helped me to somehow conduct the presentation, and we were able to save face.

I waited for the rest of the day for the problem to go away, and in the meantime I noticed more and more sites that were not accessible.

Next day I researched a lot about the problem. I used these keywords to search (the ping and tracert messages)

Ping request could not find host . Please check the name and try again.

Unable to resolve target system name .

I tried quite a lot of results but nothing helped. Finally I started doubting the least suspected culprit: the DNS servers.To cut the long story short, I changed the primary DNS server to 61.1.96.71 and moved my old primary DNS server to the 'Alternate DNS Server' box. And presto, everything was back to normal.

I guess it was some local problem; or maybe stale record on the DNS. I donno, I am no expert on this.